How to Design Perfect (Software) Products

Pieter Hintjens – How to Design Perfect (Software) Products:

Trash-Oriented Design: “Eventually, something resembling a working product makes it out of the door. It's creaky and fragile, complex and ugly. The designers curse the engineers for their incompetence and pay more consultants to put lipstick onto the pig, and slowly the product starts to look a little nicer. By this time, the managers have started to try to sell the product and they find, shockingly, that no-one wants it.”

Complexity-Oriented Design: “The team, being engineers and thus loving to build stuff, build stuff. They build and build and build and end up with massive, perfectly designed complexity. The products go to market, and the market scratches its head and asks, "seriously, is this the best you can do?"”

Simplicity-Oriented Design: “We apply one measure of quality to patches, namely "can this be done any simpler while still solving the stated problem?" We can measure complexity in terms of concepts and models that the user has to learn or guess in order to use the patch. The fewer, the better. A perfect patch solves a problem with zero learning required by the user.”

Who cares?

Seth Godin – Who cares?:

“If we define good enough sufficiently low, we'll probably meet our standards. Caring involves raising that bar to the point where the team has to stretch.

[…] Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.”

Not Piracy

Tim Bray – Not Piracy:

“Anyone who claims that unauthorized transmission of bits is analogous to piracy is at least a liar and is deeply disrespectful of the people who are suffering the effects of theft, kidnapping, and murder right now today in the Indian Ocean. They deserve your contempt, and they have mine.”

ISYS Document Filters

ISYS Document Filters: 

“Support for hundreds of common and legacy file, email, archive and container formats (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, WordPerfect, ZIPs, MSGs).

[…] Converts files into HTML and renders embedded graphics as a JPEG or PNG.”

(Via Enterprise Search.)

Successful DAM evolves to publishing system

IT Enquirer – Successful DAM evolves to publishing system:

“Integration or downright transformation into a publishing system: DAM vendors are hot in today's digitized world.

[…] Typical usages for DAM are for example brand management and photo management. Increasingly DAM is also shifting from pure management system to publishing system.

[…] Digital Asset Management can help them [marketing teams], especially when the DAM system either integrates seamlessly with a CMS or when it comes very close to being a publishing and content management system itself.”

(Via Elvis DAM.)

Tools vs insight

Seth Godin – Tools vs insight:

“Knowing about a tool is one thing. Having the guts to use it in a way that brings art to the world is another. Perhaps we need to spend less time learning new tools and more time using them.”

A great way to give thanks…

Seth Godin – A great way to give thanks…:

“For every person reading this there are a thousand people (literally a thousand) in underprivileged nations and situations that would love to have your slot. Don't waste it.”

Better Quotes

Tim Bray – Better Quotes:

“If you are publishing text for people to read and you want it to look even halfway professional, you absolutely must use real actual left and right quotation marks: “quotes” not "quotes". Also right-single apostrophe: as in don’t use "don't".”

Creatasphere DAM Europe Conference Summary

Naresh Sarwan at Digital Asset Management News – Creatasphere DAM Europe Conference Summary:

“The overwhelming sense I get is that vendors especially are too willing to invest in toys and trinkets while at the same time they leave duller and more complex (but ultimately more useful and requested) features like flexible workflow by the wayside or handle it very badly.”

Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

Patrick McKenzie – Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice:

"The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs. Producing beautiful software is not a goal. Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals."

Agile slaves

J.D. Hildebrand quotes Andy Hunt – Agile slaves:

"These weren't productive developers freed from mindless process dogma. They were Agile slaves. The dogma they followed was ours, and they followed it well. […] But they weren't thinking, they weren't reacting, they weren't being agile. When problems came up, they addressed them with all the grace and elegance of a deer caught in the terrifying blaze of alien headlights. They knew how to do Agile; they didn't know how to be agile."

(Via Thorsten Mann.)

Mercury Editor

"Mercury is a full featured HTML5 editor. It was built from the ground up to help your team get the most out of content editing in modern browsers.

To keep Mercury simple, we support all browsers that have implemented the complete W3C contentEditable specification: Firefox 4+, Chrome 10+, Safari 5+"

How to get a job with a small company

Seth Godin – How to get a job with a small company:

"Small businesses always need people who can sell, because selling pays for itself. It's not an expense, it's a profit center.

Learn to write. […] There's more writing in business today than ever before, and if you can become a persuasive copywriter, you're practically a salesperson, and even better, your work scales."

A focus on the stuff that matters most

Tim O'Reilly – A focus on the stuff that matters most:

"Profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don't want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations."

Smart Bear Live: Talk to thirty people

Jason Cohen in the Smart Bear Live! podcast, on talking to thirty people before you start building a prototype, to find out who would buy it and what they'd want you to build (starting at 1:33:58):

"It sounds so easy – "I'll just go talk to them and discover some stuff." It's really hard and most people don't do it. Like I'm telling you this, and if I had to bet, I would bet – definitely, like, very good odds – that you won't talk to anyone. And the next best odds is you'll talk to maybe three people and then make a decision one way or another. Neither of those is right. But that's what most people do. […] You tell them to go talk to thirty people. They hear me say "thirty people" and they're like "eh" and they'll talk to three people and they sort of make up their mind. That's not it! It's thirty people! Not three, thirty!"

How Non-negotiable Features Kill Software Products

Matthias Marschall – How Non-negotiable Features Kill Software Products:

"You dug your technical grave, but the rest of the company is celebrating a huge win! No one outside the tech department noticed how huge the technical debt you've just taken in order to deliver.

[…] If features are pre-sold without any option to negotiate what's important and what may be left out, you inevitably end up with too much complexity."

DMR, 1941—2011

Tim Bray – DMR, 1941—2011:

"Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I've seen or am likely to see in my lifetime.

It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie."

The Noun Project

"The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way."

Beautiful website, beautiful, free, high-quality SVG icon collection.

And a store with nice iPhone cases and t-shirts.

What I learned from Steve Jobs

Guy Kawasaki – What I learned from Steve Jobs:

"Not everyone will believe—that's okay. But the starting point of changing the world is changing a few minds. This is the greatest lesson of all that I learned from Steve."

Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

Steven Levy at Wired.com – Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011:

"After what seemed to be a successful initial surgery, Jobs would vary from his circumspect stance just once, in his address to the Stanford graduating class of 2005. That speech, by the way, might be the best commencement address in history. When designing computers, Jobs and his team built the one they wanted for themselves. And now he gave a speech that Steve Jobs would have wanted to hear if he had graduated from college."

focus

Leo Babauta – focus : a simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction. From the free PDF version of the book:

"In the days when computers took up only part of our lives, there were times when we could get away from them, when we were disconnected from the grid. Unfortunately, many people still filled much of that time with watching television, which isn't much better.

[…] When it's not a pre-appointed time to check email, have it closed. This principle, by the way, also applied to any other forms of communication, such as Twitter, Facebook, IM, forums, etc.

[…] I'd recommend using headphones — it doesn't matter what kind — to further block out distractions. It also means coworkers are less likely to interrupt you if they see the headphones on.

[…] Take responsibility for your life. If your job forces you to rush, take control of it. Make changes in what you do, in how you work. Work with your boss to make changes if necessary. And if really necessary, you can eventually change jobs.

[…] Meetings are usually a big waste of time. And they eat into your day, forcing you to squeeze the things you really need to do into small windows, and making you rush.

[…] Practice being comfortable with sitting, doing nothing. […] Try standing in line and just watching and listening to people around you. It takes practice, but after awhile, you'll do it with a smile.

[…] You do your work, one task at a time, each task done with full focus and dedication. You spend time with loved ones, as if nothing else existed. This is summed up very well by something Charles Dickens once wrote, "He did each single thing as if he did nothing else."

[…] When you walk, you can think, which is something that's hard to do when you're sitting and distracted all day. When you get to your destination, write down all the notes from your walking contemplation. When you walk, you can also clear your head, meditate, or just enjoy your surroundings and relieve stress.

[…] The employee comes in, sits down, and figures out what matters most for today. What are the 3-5 tasks that most need to get done, that will make the most difference for the company or organization? No checking email or voicemail at this point — just quiet, and focus. He then sits down and, with a completely clear desk, blocks out all distractions — no phones or other mobile devices, no email, no notifications, nothing to disrupt. He works on the first task on the list."

Projects With No Dates?

Skip Reedy – Projects With No Dates?:

"The real reason is that we think we need the safety to protect getting that task done on time. That's not what we need it for. We need safety to get the project done on time.

We don't need the safety in the task duration, we need the safety in the project duration."

Creative Tools

Joe Hewitt – Creative Tools:

"The brilliance of Facebook management is encouraging everyone to take initiative, take risks, and wear as many hats as you can. I wish more tech companies operated like this."

Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass

Adrian Short at guardian.co.uk – Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass:

"You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve. We need to use social networks to get heard and this forces us into digital serfdom. We give more power to Big Web companies with every tweet and page we post to their networks while hoping to get a bit of traffic and attention back for ourselves. The open web of free and independent websites has never looked so weak."

Identifying Passionate Developers

Jeff Vera – Identifying Passionate Developers:

"Passionate developers, whether quiet or loud, think. Keep them a bit off their balance by jumping around just a bit. If they're not thinking about their answers, if only for a little bit, then you don't have a passionate developer, you have a salesman."

(Via entwickler.com.)

The Cloud's My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic – The Cloud's My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem:

"We all know the feeling of logging into Facebook / Tumblr / Twitter / Netflix / Pandora / Gmail and realizing that the interface has changed. Maybe the company's internal testing says the new interface is better organized, but dang – we'd gotten used to the last one and we liked it.

[…] They remind us that we're all just children in the eyes of the cloud services provider and as long as we're under their roof, we play by their rules. At a time when trust in all kinds of civic institutions is at an all-time low, we place a lot of faith in our cloud services to do what is goodly and just. We get so upset with Facebook changes because they spark cognitive dissonance: I believe I do not trust Facebook but I act as if I trust Facebook by giving them my data."

Talker's block

Seth Godin – Talker's block:

"If you're concerned with quality, of course, then not writing is not a problem, because zero is perfect and without defects. Shipping nothing is safe.

The second best thing to zero is something better than bad."

"Please complain"

Seth Godin – "Please complain":

"If no one is listening, the thinking goes, then perhaps the annoyed will quietly go away.

[…] Whichever strategy you choose, you should choose. It's the middle way that vexes... the pretending, the grudging acceptance, the insertion of many levels of filters."

No guys, it's IT vs. End-Users

Chris Riley at aiim Capture – No guys, it's IT vs. End-Users:

"Avoid the end-users, create something they don't need. Involve the end-users, increase the deployment time.

[…] IT should once again be more cutting edge then their end-users. Solving problems end-users did not even know they had. By doing so transforming their value from a specialty in obscurity into a science of efficiency."

(Via Digital Asset Management News.)

Customer culture

Marco Arment – Customer culture:

"People who aren't willing or able to compromise on their needs regularly are much more likely to be Windows customers. The Windows message is much more palatable to corporate buyers, committees, middlemen, and people who don't like to be told what's best for them: "You can do whatever you want, and we'll attempt to glue it together. It won't always work very well, and you might not like the results, but we will do exactly what you asked for."

The Six Pillars of Complete Developer Documentation

ProgrammableWeb – The Six Pillars of Complete Developer Documentation:

"A complete documentation set should try to include the following:

Class Reference: A comprehensive listing of API functionality.
Changelog: A reference of what changes in each API version.
Code Samples: A set of examples showing typical API usage.
Code Playground: An interactive explorer for trying the API live in the browser.
Developers Guide: A conversational written guide to using the API.
Articles: Tutorials and screencasts discussing different ways of using the API."

(Via Thorsten Mann.)

Ridiculously Transparent

Scott Weiss – Ridiculously Transparent:

"The more that I thought about it, the more I believed that sharing absolutely everything would create massive advantages and that we should live with whatever consequences resulted.

So, after board meetings, we would assemble the company and go through every board slide... How much cash in the bank? What's our burn rate? What are the biggest problems we are facing?

[…] When everyone had a clear understanding of the hard problems, their collective brains were on the table for parallel processing. The best information rarely sat with the senior executives but with the employees that were closest to the product and closest to the customers."

(Via Fred Wilson.)

Embrace And Extend

Henri Bergius – Embrace And Extend:

"These [SPDY, Dart, Schema.org] - together with WebSQL, NaCl, WebM and WebP - mean that Google has active efforts to replace practically every layer of the web (except HTML itself) with something of their own design.

The way all of these were introduced bears strong reminders of how Microsoft tried to embrace, extend, and extinguish the web in late 90s."

Watir and Watir WebDriver

"Watir, pronounced water, is an open-source (BSD) family of Ruby libraries for automating web browsers. It allows you to write tests that are easy to read and maintain. It is simple and flexible.

Watir drives browsers the same way people do. It clicks links, fills in forms, presses buttons. Watir also checks results, such as whether expected text appears on the page."

Install Watir WebDriver and get started within a minute…

"Automated test script recorders (like Selenium IDE) are for dummies. Seriously. The combination of the instant feedbackness of irb, with the awesomeness of the Watir-WebDriver API means you'll be way more productive and efficient using these two things that you'll ever be with a silly recorder."

al3x’s Rules for Computing Happiness

Alex Payne – al3x's Rules for Computing Happiness:

"Do not use software that must sync over the internet to function. [Ed.: I'm looking at you, Microsoft Outlook.]

[…] Use a plain text editor that you know well.

[…] Do not use anything other than a Mac at home and Linux/BSD on the server.

[…] Buy as large an external display as you can afford if you'll be working on the computer for more than three hours at a time."

(Via Marco Arment.)

Not fade away

Seth Godin – Not fade away:

"Just because there are no firestorms on the porch doesn't mean you're doing okay. More likely, there are relationships out there that need more investment, quiet customers who are unhappy but not making a big deal out of it."

HTTP basic authentication using OS X Lion Server accounts

Mac OS X Lion Server has a nice built-in directory (LDAP) server – when you need to password protect a web page hosted there, you don't want to set up user accounts in old-fashioned "htpasswd" text files. It's much nicer to set up HTTP basic authentication against the users and groups you manage in the Server App.

With some help from the Trac documentation, it was quite easy to make this work. (Please note that I'm not an OS X Server expert, so I might have broken something or missed a better way. Try at your own risk.)

First I enabled mod_auth_basic.so in the Apache web server configuration file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf (seems to be required in addition to mod_auth_apple.so) – for some reason, this line is missing in the <IfDefine MACOSXSERVER> block so I added it there:

LoadModule auth_basic_module libexec/apache2/mod_auth_basic.so

Then I inserted this into /etc/apache2/sites/0000_any_80_.conf:

<Directory "/Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/Default/secret">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    AuthName "Secret stuff"
    AuthType Basic
    AuthUserFile /dev/null
    AuthBasicAuthoritative Off
    Require valid-user
    # Instead of "valid-user", you could also limit access by group name:
    # Require group "dcxadmin"
</Directory> 

After an Apache restart (sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl restart), everything worked as expected: I was able to access the password protected directory with a test user account created in Server App.

The Death—and Reinvention—of Management: Part 1

Steve Denning on "Radical Management" – The Death—and Reinvention—of Management: Part 1:

"The firm makes money, but this is the result of delighting the customer, not the goal.

[…] Nayar saw that the people doing the work were the ones who created value for the customers. Taken together they created the value zone within the organization. Without them, the firm was nothing but a shell, layers and layers of management and aggregators who had nothing to offer to the customers.

[…] The sneer of cold command can slice through the warm, convivial world of social norms like a knife and kill it on the spot."

(Via Forbes.com.)

The facts

Seth Godin – The facts:

"Your position on just about everything, including, yes, your salary, your stock options, your credit card debt and your mortgage are almost certainly based on the story you tell yourself, not some universal fact from the universal fact database."

Icon Ambulance

Vic Gundotra – Icon Ambulance:

"But in the end, when I think about leadership, passion and attention to detail, I think back to the call I received from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning in January. It was a lesson I'll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday."

What I learned from Steve Jobs

Aaron Levie, CEO of box.com – What I learned from Steve Jobs:

"We all have the ability to create excellence. And frankly, it's a lot more fun when we do. Crap is less fun, less inspiring, less motivating, and less rewarding. And if at any point you stop doing pursuing excellence, just ask yourself, 'what would Steve do?'"

Autonomy marketing, meet HP

Enterprise Search Blog – Autonomy marketing, meet HP:

"But now, in the second decade of the not-so-new century, customers expect to use a GUI to configure, manage, and customize enterprise search; and just about all of IDOL is still 'command line based'. […] Sure, they've added dozens of new capabilities... API calls, and the like... but the platform is still a solid 1990s kind of experience. "Powered by vi" was funny in 1998; not so much now."

Twice as much doesn't always mean twice as much

Seth Godin – Twice as much doesn't always mean twice as much:

"The challenge, of course, is that twice as much of your time or money is irrelevant. Who cares where you started? The correct comparison is to what the competition is investing, and how well."

Ten Year Agile Retrospective: How We Can Improve In The Next Ten Years

Jeff Sutherland on Scrum/Agile – Ten Year Agile Retrospective: How We Can Improve In The Next Ten Years:

"Industry data shows that fixing bugs on the same day as they are discovered will double the velocity of a team.

[…] Traditional project management assumes that users know what they want before software is built. As a result, over 65% of features built are either rarely or never used by the customers. This problem was formalized as "Humphrey's Law", yet it is systematically ignored in university and industry training of managers and project leaders.

[…] Getting product backlog ready requires professional product managers that understand user needs and team capabilities with a passion for delivering excellence. Getting product backlog done in a sprint requires prioritizing work, continuously integrating work in progress, and intolerance of defects. Demanding technical excellence is the top priority for the next ten years."

(Via entwickler.com.)

Aloha Editor

Aloha Editor: "The world's most advanced browser HTML5 based WYSIWYG editor lets you experience a whole new way of editing. It's faster than existing technologies and offers unprecedented WYSIWYG functionalities."

(Via Henri Bergius.)

Will Adobe Provide The Edge For DAM?

Naresh Sarwan at Digital Asset Management News – Will Adobe Provide The Edge For DAM?:

"Following the release of Adobe Flex 3 in 2007, many DAM vendors made some investment into Flex/Flash, but many also quickly retreated from releasing their full product strategies for Flex due to the spiralling costs and complexities encountered when any atypical use scenario was required."

When the truth is just around the corner

Seth Godin – When the truth is just around the corner:

"When your organization has a chance to see itself as its customers do, do your leaders crowd around, trying to glean every insight they can about the story and your future, or do they prefer the status quo?"

Responsibility and authority

Seth Godin – Responsibility and authority:

"There's a different approach, though, one that's based on responsibility instead of authority. "Anyone who takes responsibility for getting something done is welcome to ask for the authority to do it."

Tilt: Visualize your Web page in 3D

"Tilt is a Firefox extension that lets you visualize any web page DOM tree in 3D."

(Via Nat Torkington at O'Reilly Radar.)

Own your identity

Marco Arment – Own your identity:

"Sadly, most people don’t care about giving control of their online identity to current or future advertising companies.

But there will always be the open web for the geeks, the misfits, the eccentrics, the control freaks, and any other term we can think of to proudly express our healthy skepticism of giving up too much control over what really should be ours."

(Via Dave Winer.)

The invisible crossroads

Seth Godin – The invisible crossroads:

"It's easy to get stressed and excited about the infrequent crossroads. It's just as easy to ignore the daily opportunities you have to change everything."

Why is nobody using SSL client certificates?

Philip Hofstetter back in 2008 – Why is nobody using SSL client certificates?:

"Did you know that ever since the days of Netscape Navigator 3.0, there is a technology that allows you to

– securely sign on without using passwords,

– allow for non-annoying two-factor authentication,

– uniquely identify yourself to third-party websites without giving the second party any account information

All of this can be done using SSL client certificates."

(Sounds like a better Single Sign-On solution to me than BrowserID.)

Make Your Business 10X Faster with Box’s New Search

Sam Ghods of Box.net – Make Your Business 10X Faster with Box's New Search:

"We re-evaluated our technology and decided to make a switch to a fully distributed and scalable search platform using the open source project Solr, powered by Lucene. If Solr sounds familiar, that's because odds are good you're already using it. Companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn and Twitter are successfully using Solr on a massive scale, and we're excited to join them in using and developing on top of this mature, robust technology."

PDFBox - PDF Highlighting

PDFBox - PDF Highlighting:

"There are cases when you might want to highlight text in a PDF document. For example, if the PDF is the result of a search request you might want to highlight the word in the resulting PDF document. There are several ways this can be achieved, each method varying in complexity and flexibility."

How To Run A News Site And Newspaper Using WordPress And Google Docs

Lauren Rabaino – How To Run A News Site And Newspaper Using WordPress And Google Docs:

"1. Reporters and editors compose all stories in Google Docs. Using labels and native commenting, the stories get sent through the editing process.

2. When a story is ready to publish, it gets sent from Google Docs to WordPress with one click.

3. In WordPress, editors can publish the story to the web, then set up a print headline and print subhead.

4. The story then appears in inDesign, where print designers can lay out the print newspaper."

Why Diaspora will fail

Matthew Rogers back in 2010 – Why Diaspora will fail:

"Facebook isn't evil by accident. Its massive numbers of users allow it to be that way. If the majority of people actually cared enough about their online privacy, then they'd leave Facebook."

(Via Andreas Schiffler – Re: Replacing Facebook.)

Do the right thing, wait to get fired

Chade-Meng Tan – Do the right thing, wait to get fired:

"I recently learned that one reason he was so successful was because he was unafraid to speak the unpleasant truth to his superiors to their faces."

(Via Brian Fitzpatrick.)

Marketing to your own team

Matt Linderman at Signal vs. Noise – Marketing to your own team:

"It’s a good lesson: You’re not just sending out a message externally, you’re sending one out internally too. If your employees don’t believe it, the whole plan falls apart."

Content marketing is not enough — The fulfillment gap

Natasha Gabriel – Content marketing is not enough — The fulfillment gap:

"Too many companies focus on the on the point of sale as the key milestone, doing everything they can to close a sale. This is a flawed mindset. Instead of just trying to get money from customers, companies need to focus on getting customers satisfied with their purchase.  A big part of this is the disconnect between sales and fulfillment."

The Mistake at the Heart of Agile

Gojko Adzic on a presentation by Michael Feathers – The Mistake at the Heart of Agile:

"Both scrum and XP had the same organisation context – protecting the development organisation from the rest of the business. 

[…] Keith Braithwaite said these ideas were implemented to give developers “a safe place to work” in the face of chaos on the other end and that such structures should be considered a temporary barrier."

Caring

Seth Godin – Caring:

"If you want to build a caring organization, you need to fill it with caring people and then get out of their way."

No multitasking for teams either

Jack Vinson – No multitasking for teams either:

"[Geoffrey] Moore mentioned a common problem of companies: they ask project teams to focus on more than one thing at a time, and that this kills the team's capability to do anything well.

[…] You get the picture: each project has to be focused on one goal. And I like the comment that I think I heard at the outset: don't put the same teams to be on projects that will divide their energies."

Bug statistics are a waste of time

Gojko Adzic – Bug statistics are a waste of time:

"A frequent excuse for bug reports is that the management needs them to know the current quality status. […] Alan Weiss explained that nicely in Million Dollar Consulting:

"Quality, I patiently explain, is not the absence of something in management’s eyes, that is, defects, but the presence of something in the consumer’s eyes, that is, value."

Instead of reporting things that are easy to measure but have low value, why not spend a bit more time actually defining what quality is and report that?"

The future of the library

Seth Godin – The future of the library:

"There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime."

Brand exceptionalism

Seth Godin – Brand exceptionalism:

"Brand humility is the only response to a fast-changing and competitive marketplace. The humble brand understands that it needs to re-earn attention, re-earn loyalty and reconnect with its audience as if every day is the first day."

The 13 Areas of Cost for a DAM System

Joshua Duhl – The 13 Areas of Cost for a DAM System:

"In almost every successful DAM installation (hosted or not) that I am aware of has 1-3 people (depending on the size and breadth of the organization) who is/are the DAM “master(s)” – more than a librarian or governance provider for the assets, this role(s) oversees the DAM from a combined business use and technical perspective. It expands and updates the metadata model (assuming the system supports that after it’s initially established  , enforces consistency, updates the folder/collection hierarchy for consistent access, and is usually involved in the soliciting, vetting and resolving all modifications to the system."

Selling vs. inviting

Seth Godin – Selling vs. inviting:

"The salesperson's job: Help people overcome their fear so they can commit to something they'll end up glad they invested in.

The goal of a marketer ought to be to make it so easy to be a salesperson, you're merely an inviter. The new marketing is largely about this – creating a scenario where you don't even need salespeople. (Until you do.)"

Why speed matters

Joshua-Michéle Ross at O'Reilly Radar – Why speed matters:

"Human beings live and operate in a constant state of now; we process extraordinary volumes of information in real time. The acceleration of technology is simply an effort to catch up to our zero-latency experience of being. Whenever given a choice, we will opt for a service that delivers response times as fast as our own nervous system."

Real time vs. slow time – and a defense of sane work hours

Jason Fried – Real time vs. slow time – and a defense of sane work hours:

"I think companies would benefit from giving employees a lot more autonomy and alone time to do their work. And then when they do need to come together, it can be more special and more meaningful. It’s like seeing an old friend you haven’t seen for a long time – it’s kind of a special moment for a couple hours and then you go break up and go back to your own lives and that’s fine. And that’s how we like to treat our work here."

The opportunity is here

Seth Godin – The opportunity is here:

"The old economy offered a guarantee – time plus education plus obedience = stability. The new one, not so much. The new one offers a chance for you to take a chance and make an impact.

[…] If someone can tell you precisely what to do, it's too late. Art and novelty and innovation cannot be reliably and successfully industrialized."

Attention Information Workers: Your Job Description Has Changed

Craig Roth (Gartner Blog Network) – Attention Information Workers: Your Job Description Has Changed:

"It may sound like one should hire interns to pick through all the garbage so the high priced brains can then analyze the findings, as law firms do for discovery.  But the worker’s subscriptions, filters, watch lists, bookmarks, tags, intuition about what is of value,  and applying years of accumulated knowledge about where to look and (more importantly) who to pay attention to is of tremendous value in a knowledge economy."

(Via Jack Vinson.)

Why makers should think a little bit more like managers (and vice versa)

Seth Godin – Why makers should think a little bit more like managers (and vice versa):

"Makers need to be disciplined enough to interact like managers, else they will become pawns in a system they don't sufficiently influence. If you're not present when decisions are getting made, my guess is that you won't like what gets decided..."

Why I Run a Flat Company

Jason Fried at Inc. – Why I Run a Flat Company:

"What we learned is that adding a dedicated manager and creating a hierarchy is not the only way to create structure. Instead, we decided to let the team be entirely self-managed. There's still a team leader, but that role rotates among the team every week. Each week, a new leader sketches out the agenda, writes up the notes about problems and performance, and steps up to handle any troubled customer interactions."

Your Emails are Too Long

Leo Babauta – Your Emails are Too Long:

"If the info you need to share isn’t on the web, put it there. Create a long answer or long background document (then edit it to the essential info) and post it online. […] Link to it in your email."

My So-Called DAM Life

Leala Abbott – My So-Called DAM Life:

"The archives at NYU was where I found that this interesting blend of a technology background, coupled with some archives know-how made me a unique bird indeed."

Are you doing a good job?

Seth Godin – Are you doing a good job?:

"The other way: "What aren't they asking me to do that I can do, learn from, make an impact, and possibly fail (yet survive)? What's not on my agenda that I can fight to put there? Who can I frighten, what can I learn, how can I go faster, what sort of legacy am I creating?"

Twitter's new developer roadmap

Dave Winer – Twitter's new developer roadmap:

"Facebook may have a huge installed base, but it's dead to me. I can't get there. The platform vendor is too active. Same with Twitter, same with Apple. Give me a void, something I can develop for, where I can follow the idea where ever it leads."

Cascade of broken promises

Seth Godin – Cascade of broken promises:

"The cascade starts with the product. When your brand makes promises it can't keep, your overworked staff bears the brunt."

Curation is boring

Stijn Debrouwere – Curation is boring:

"Readers want to know what everybody else is talking about, and join the debate. So tracking what’s hot is, well, cool. But instead of the bazillionth trend tracking app, I’d much rather see a tool that would use aggregation, machine learning and natural language processing to crawl the far outreaches of the web and spot obscure but valuable news or opinions that could enhance existing coverage. Like a robot army of researchers for every reporter, working 24/24 to suggest new angles and exciting topics we’ve missed. Topics everyone has missed."

Who will say go?

Seth Godin – Who will say go?:

"Most people don't believe they are capable of initiative.

Initiating a project, a blog, a wikipedia article, a family journey. Initiating something even when you're not putatitively in charge.

At the same time, almost all people believe they are capable of editing, giving feedback or merely criticizing."

The Rise of Personal Content Management (PCM)

Stéphane Croisier – The Rise of Personal Content Management (PCM): The Next Shadow IT?:

"Perhaps your favorite ECM is guilty of having spent a bit too much time in the last 10 years to try to unify all your company content assets while completely stopping taking care of the individual employee needs?"

(Via Digital Asset Management.)

Open Source Search with Lucene & Solr

Ilya Grigorik – Open Source Search with Lucene & Solr:

"Salesforce, LinkedIn and just recently Twitter are all examples of large-scale Lucene deployments that many of us use on a day-to-day basis. Salesforce started with Lucene back in 2002 and today manages an 8TB+ index (~20 billion documents).

[…]  iTunes is another notable user, said to be handling up to 800 queries/sec, and at PostRank we are currently managing a 1TB+ index (growing at ~40GB a week) with over 1.2 billion documents."

(Via Patrick Durusau.)

Agile product management using Effect Maps

Gojko Adzic – Effect Mapping:

"Effect Mapping is a game-changing technique for high level project visualization. It provides stakeholders and sponsors with an excellent level of visibility and helps to drive software projects towards delivering the right product with a high level of quality."

From the paper [PDF]:

"Why are we doing this? What is the desired business change? This is the business goal. Put that goal in the centre of the map so that you can always keep that in mind."

Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You

NYTimes.com – Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You:

"Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software."

(Via Dave Winer.)

In a change, it isn't your point of view that matters

Jack Vinson – In a change, it isn't your point of view that matters:

"In the context of the stories, it was "spirit killing" the people who were subjected to these changes when their point of view was not considered.

Whenever a change is introduced, the people who have created the change are the most familiar with the new situation they want to create and why it should be created. But everyone else?"

Conformity, innovation, and progress

Chris Spagnuolo back in 2008 – Conformity, innovation, and progress:

"Some time later, Asch conducted his experiments again. This time, when every one of the confederates voted for the wrong answer, one stood up and said “That’s wrong!”. The test subject then easily identified the correct answer. Adding one supporting partner greatly diminished the power of the majority. Hope!

One voice of dissent enabled another to be heard. Is that all it takes on our teams, in our society to make a difference? One voice to say “That’s wrong”? I believe so."

A month is fifteen weekends

Eric Ries – A month is fifteen weekends:

"Think about that for a second. If only they had one more day. Think how valuable a single day is, when  used to its maximum potential. And now think how casually we throw a day of work away, when it’s just one tiny part of a huge batch, as in a monthly release cycle."

The DAM Metadata Disconnect

Margie Friant – The DAM Metadata Disconnect:

"Nothing beats a professional indexing team for improving accuracy and adding value to machine-generated metadata. For accuracy of retrieval, there is no replacement for a well-tailored controlled vocabulary used in combination with a well-designed indexing policy. This is one of the many places where information professionals excel.

[…] The best DAM vendors know that their tool is just part of the solution for asset management and a great team of people needs to set guidelines, determine field requirements and design searchability together."

(Via Digital Asset Management News.)

Seven ways to think like the web

Jon Udell – Seven ways to think like the web:

"Nobody else cares about your data as much as you do. If other people and other systems source your data from a canonical URL that you advertise and control, then they will always get data that’s as timely and accurate as you care to make it.

[…] An email message address one or several people; a blog post on a company intranet can address the whole company; a blog post on the public web can address the whole world. Web thinkers know that keystrokes invested to capture and transmit knowledge will pay the highest dividends when routed to the widest appropriate scope."

The journo-programmer

Dave Winer – The journo-programmer:

"Writing code, like writing long essays like this one, is not something you can do in an environment with lots of interruptions. One interruption at the wrong time can set you back by hours as the map falls out of your head. Programming and writing are both intellectual acts. So why would you expect great results from a crowded, smelly room that people have been living in for 24 hours.

[…] I would also insist that every student, without exception, run their own server. […] That server will play the same role that a cadaver plays for a medical student. It's a place for them to make mistakes, to gain experience, to gain rational and realistic fears, but not unnecessary ones."

Box.net Announces Product Updates: Potential Threat To DAM Vendors?

Naresh Sarwan at Digital Asset Management News – Box.net Announces Product Updates: Potential Threat To DAM Vendors?:

"With some DAM vendors eager to tout the benefits of SaaS as a way to get around draconian IT departments and reduce deployment headaches, SaaS inevitably encourages increased commoditisation and makes it easier for the lower cost providers to directly compete with them.  Box.net and their ilk may ironically help bolster the position of enterprise vendors and sharpen the dividing line between enterprise and commodity solutions to the detriment of the mid-range DAM SaaS vendor.

[…] It remains to be seen how far box.net will progress in DAM, but the message is clear for DAM vendors, if your product has poor usability or fails to offer clear and compelling benefits over low cost commodity services then you stand to lose out over the medium-long term."

What Is a Curator in Chief?

Fast Company – What Is a Curator in Chief?:

"Machines may evolve, but they'll never have a human sense of relevance. "As curator, I need "gut instinct". As I'm scanning the web (with our tools), I sometimes find sources or articles that I think are valuable--even though they might not be a perfect match to our customers' specifications. In essence, the curator curates not only the content, but also the technology so that the results are always improving while the algorithmic rules are adapting."

Can't get quality thinking when you are multitasking

Jack Vinson points to Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz – Can't get quality thinking when you are multitasking:

"Deresiewicz makes the connection to one's ability to think and develop their own opinions and thoughts on a matter. Multitasking prevents this, just as it damages quality and safety. And the solution is similar: give yourself (and your people) the direction needed to focus on ONE THING AT A TIME."

How Facebook Ships Code

Yee Lee – How Facebook Ships Code:

"very engineering driven culture.  ”product managers are essentially useless here.” is a quote from an engineer.  engineers can modify specs mid-process, re-order work projects, and inject new feature ideas anytime.

[…] they really want engineers to publicly own products and be the main point of contact for the things they built.

[…] Engineers handle entire feature themselves — front end javascript, backend database code, and everything in between.  If they want help from a Designer (there are a limited staff of dedicated designers available), they need to get a Designer interested enough in their project to take it on."

Confessions of a jerk

Andrew Stellman – Confessions of a jerk:

 "I perfected all of the programmer stonewalling tricks to get people to stop asking me questions: interrupting people with pedantic questions before they’d barely started getting to the point, sending people back with half-answers so I didn’t have to think through the question I was being asked, answering questions in a way that was obviously far too technical for whoever I was talking to so. And heaven help anyone who said something to me that was technically inaccurate."

Staging Servers, Source Control & Deploy Workflows, And Other Stuff Nobody Teaches You

Patrick McKenzie – Staging Servers, Source Control & Deploy Workflows, And Other Stuff Nobody Teaches You:

"Setting up a staging server should be easy.  If it is not easy, you already have a problem in your infrastructure, you just don’t know it yet: you’ve cobbled together your production server over time, usually by manually SSHing into it and tweaking things without keeping a log of what you have done.  (Been there, done that, got the “I Created A Monster” T-shirt.)  There isn’t a written procedure or automated script for creating it from the bare metal.  If you had that procedure written, you should be able to execute it and create a staging server that works inside of an hour."

(Via Nat Torkington at O'Reilly Radar.)

An unhealthy obsession with organization

Anonymous guest post at Gia Lyons – An unhealthy obsession with organization:

"I want everyone to think about the way they use documents today, your SharePoint sites, your shared drives with team project folder structures, your Atlassian Wikis. You’ve invested a lot of energy into finely crafting an organizational structure that will last a thousand years. Does anyone really use it? Do people still put things where ever the hell they want to?

[…] You don’t need to meander through some haystack of organization – you can simply, search. You expect that of the world-wide-web; why do you not expect that of your workplace?"

(Via @digitalassetman and Jack Vinson.)

The Analog-ists Revenge: How analog thinking can impact DAM

Leala Abbott – The Analog-ists Revenge: How analog thinking can impact DAM:

"Digital Asset Managers understand that every digital asset we choose comes with a cost (resources it will take to manage, upkeep, file formats, migrations etc), therefore we are extremely judicious with both what we keep (the assets) and how we keep it (the metadata). We have to say “no” when something is just outside the scope of the collection or would involve to much manual metadata entry. Whenever possibly we side with automation as opposed to human processing or cataloging."

Why "Delivering Happiness" is a must read

Linda Stone at O'Reilly Radar – Why "Delivering Happiness" is a must read:

"At many companies, software developers are rewarded for knocking out the list of features and cranking toward the release date with no emphasis on the quality of the feature being checked. Does it work? Check. Tests ran? Check. Is anyone asking if it's contributing to the excellence of the product or service?"

Sure, but what's the hard part?

Seth Godin – Sure, but what's the hard part?:

"Hard is not about sweat or time, hard is about finishing the rare, valuable, risky task that few complete.

Don't tell me you want to launch a line of spices but don't want to make sales calls to supermarket buyers. That's the hard part."